


Seven beginnings and an ((un)happily) ever after

by internationalprincess



Category: West Wing
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-07-29
Updated: 2002-07-29
Packaged: 2017-10-14 00:49:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/internationalprincess/pseuds/internationalprincess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's in Washington State that he realizes he's not sure it happened at all.</p><p>2002 Jeds - Third Place - Outstanding Josh/Sam</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven beginnings and an ((un)happily) ever after

Toby throws the sheaf of papers he's been holding down on the desk and kicks at a nearby file box to accentuate his disgust.

"Can someone tell me...can someone please explain to me why this campaign doesn't merit an *actual* speechwriter instead of an attorney?!"

He turns and storms from the overcrowded back office. Sam removes his glasses and drops them beside his laptop, rubbing at his eyes with the heel of one hand.

He's startled when Josh appears beside him, so engrossed in his thoughts he'd been unaware there was anyone else in the room.

"This isn't exactly what I signed on for," Sam sighs, managing a rueful smile.

"I'll talk to him," Josh says.

"No, no. That isn't what I signed on for either, Josh. I don't need you to protect me."

Josh pauses for a moment, and then claps Sam on the back. But his hand remains and slides up a little, touching Sam's neck above his collar, before he turns away.

Sam feels inexplicably worse, and wonders if he is coming down with something.

*

The second time it happens, they're sitting on opposite sides of a table littered with paper. Polling numbers and projections. Schedules and state maps. A cell phone starts ringing somewhere under the mess and they both reach for it at the same time. Their hands clatter together and they both yank them away, as if burned.

The phone keeps ringing, and Josh finally answers it. Sam pushes his chair back and abruptly leaves the room.

He leans against the wall outside and loosens his tie. He thinks it might be the flu.

*

It's been raining for a week and the air on the bus is fetid, like wet overcoats pressed too close together on the subway, or t-shirts put away damp. They're in Washington State and he has an urge to drive south to California and dunk himself in the Pacific somewhere near Carmel. He wants to tell Josh this and hear him make a disparaging remark about Sam's misplaced fascination with the West Coast.

But Josh is in Connecticut. And he didn't say goodbye.

There was an interminable passage of time, as Donna was on the phone in the next room ordering airlines around with a note of desperation in her voice, and they were more or less alone. He sat beside Josh with one hand on his back, but he didn't say anything at all.

It's possible that he was pressing a kiss to Josh's temple as Donna walked back in. But when her hand flew to her mouth and her eyes got very big, he discovered they were still a respectable distance apart, and she was staring at Josh instead.

It's in Washington State that he realizes he's not sure it happened at all.

*

They were in Manhattan, and were too young and so brash, but he'd just closed his first real deal and he'd been feeling buoyant. It was a Superbowl Sunday, and they watched the game in a bar because watching it at home on the couch was something you did with people you actually knew. Sam drank Coronas, with sharp lime wedges tight inside the necks. Josh seemed at ease, didn't keep looking toward the door or the bar the way he usually did. And as they were leaving - walking back to the subway - Sam said something idiotic and Josh grabbed him in a mock headlock, trying to force him to concede.

And just as Sam cried, "Uncle," in a voice hoarse from laughing and yelling at the television screen, Josh was there. Fingers in his hair.

Too perfect. Too painful.

Like a fever dream, he begins to understand.

*

Josh tells him on the phone not to fly out for the funeral. He even hints that he might not rejoin the campaign.

"It's just...I think I should be here for a while."

They don't speak again until one week later, when Josh strolls into the campaign headquarters in California, drops his backpack on a table, and says, "Someone show me polling information that's not the same as CNN's."

Sam tries twice to talk to him.

The first time is over a sandwich, sitting on the bumper of a volunteer's van, while the sound crew set up the venue for the Governor's address. Josh cuts him off by asking him to rewrite the section on housing subsidies, crumples the paper his lunch was wrapped in, and lobs it over Sam's head into the back of the van as he walks away.

Sam figures it's probably too soon.

Too soon, anyway, for the soft knock on his hotel room door sometime around two in the morning and the rasp of day-old stubble against his skin.

The night of the third debate he tries again.

The Governor is heavy in his arms, and Josh is looking at him in shock, and Sam can see that his father's dying in his eyes all over again.

"You've got to find Leo," he calls over his shoulder, which seems like the right thing to say at the time.

But when Josh and Leo arrive at the debate site, barely moments before the event is due to start, Josh looks as though he has aged ten years.

Sam reaches for him, or he thinks he does, but it must be that he misses because Josh starts sleeping with Mandy that night.

*

He thinks that there are seven things he hates about Mandy and none of them have nothing to do with Josh.

Although, if he's being honest, Mandy reminds him of Lisa, and maybe that's the problem after all.

He remembers vividly one night when Lisa was an hour and a half late to meet him, at some brand new bar with a name he couldn't pronounce, filled with people he couldn't understand. Sam got talking to the bartender, and he was bemoaning the stupid names given to cocktails and how they always have something to do with sex. The bartender, who had wild hair and dark eyes, said that his favorite drink was something called a Happily Ever After, and he made one for Sam.

What he remembers clearly is the steel glare in Lisa's eye when she did finally show up. She took one look at the bartender, and dragged Sam away.

*

It rains the morning after the inauguration and Sam doesn't get out of bed until noon. He has a hangover, but it's the good kind. Aching muscles and a headache that a couple of Tylenol will fix. And he works for the President of the United States now, so everything else pales a little by comparison.

He's in such a good mood that he calls CJ, just to gloat with someone who will understand.

"It's real, isn't it?" he asks, and her laughter sounds distorted through the phone.

"It might be," she replies.

And it might be Josh's bow tie lying across the back of his couch, but it might be his own.

*

Maybe Josh is right, and his fascination with the West Coast is misplaced. His axis now seems firmly anchored between Manhattan and DC.

A before and after photo on an infomercial. The kind that plays late at night when the sound is down low on the television because he can't sleep but he doesn't want to wake Josh.

And then again, maybe Lisa was right when she yelled at him that he was a lunatic living in a fantasy world of his own creation.

He's really not sure.

*

CJ has a cocktail party to celebrate her housewarming a week after the inauguration.

"Apparently," she says to Sam, "it's important to warm an apartment I'll be unlikely to see for the next four years."

It's mostly campaign people, but a few too many, and the apartment has a claustrophobic feel about it. He finds himself pressed against the countertop in the open plan kitchen, watching Josh hit on a petite intern, as CJ ashes a cigarette into a potted plant someone has given her as a gift.

"Let me make you a drink," CJ suggests, and it occurs to Sam that he hasn't said anything for a while. Maybe too long. Perhaps CJ has noticed.

"I'd like a Happily Ever After," he says, refocusing his attention on her.

"Wouldn't we all," she says with a wry smile, and he teaches her how to make them. They fill a plastic jug and take paper cups and sit on the fire stairs, talking. It's January and far too cold for such adolescent behaviour. CJ gives him something she calls a pashmina, which she winds twice around his neck.

"I have to know now, Sam," she says softly, not looking at him. "I mean, before...it would have been okay that I didn't. But now...now, it's my job."

Sam thinks about his answer for a long moment, and reaches over to take the cigarette from between her gloved fingers, as if burning paper and tobacco can warm him at all. He exhales a long sigh, and then turns away from her as he drops the butt in his paper cup and eases up to his feet.

"There are no happily ever afters, CJ," he says, and he goes inside.

*

The appearance on Capital Beat is catastrophic, and Sam calls him immediately.

"Don't...just...don't," Josh sighs into the phone, but he agrees to meet for a drink after work.

Sam's not that surprised when Josh doesn't show. But he'll be damned if he's spending his evening defending Josh to Bill Kenworthy while eyeing the door, so he smiles at the girl with the long hair and even longer legs, and doesn't say no when she asks him home.

It should be simple, but karma always seems to protest, and he can't read the look on Josh's face when he confesses about Laurie as anything more than a fear of political vulnerability.

At least, he tells himself that, until the moment he hears Josh saying to this new kid, "Charlie, I wonder if you could tell me about your social life, your friends, what you like to do?"

Josh interrupts Sam's sudden outburst and steers him out of the room with a firm hand on his back, turning on him immediately.

"What the hell was all that about?"

"This is ridiculous," Sam manages.

"It's not all that ridiculous."

"I know the difference between right and wrong," he spits back, thinking 'and so should you' but not saying it.

"It's not like you didn't know you were going to be held to a higher standard when you took this job."

And there it is, Sam thinks, right there in the air between them.

"I don't mind being held to a higher standard. I mind being held to a lower one." The fire in his eyes is lit by the hypocrisy in Josh's.

*

It's so late and he's so very tired, and his back clicks in an alarming way when he stretches.

He's done okay, up about forty dollars, and now he wants his bed.

Josh is talking about the Commerce Report, and he's not listening until Josh looks at him and asks him what he's going to do.

"I was going to go home."

"Sam," Josh says, and the look he gives Sam is so blatant that he wonders why the card table doesn't combust. The others laugh, but CJ sends him an email the next day that says only this:

Don't make the same mistake thrice.

"Do you find, the less sleep you get, the weirder your dreams are?" he asks her later over lunch. "Like hallucinations?"

She snags another French fry and nods, which could mean she agrees, but probably means she's humoring him.

"Bad dreams, Sam?" she asks.

Fever dreams, he thinks. Flowing through hot New York days and freezing Washington nights. Impenetrable, liquid and foreign. Black ink on paper. Wet skin. Muscled sunlight on blue sheets. Tanker ships sinking, and Mandy with blonde hair, or Lisa with dark eyes. He can't tell anymore.

It seems, in the colors of his dreams, there are black and white spaces too. Words of devotion, words of denial, and the strength of forgiveness.

And the touches, he realizes, looking at CJ who clearly thinks he's gone crazy. The catalog of contact. The small patches of skin that glow in the dark. These are the hallucinations, the total lack of lucidity.

He goes back to talking about the census, and avoids CJ's wary stare. He has no confidence to explain what he sees when he closes his eyes, and no energy left to try.

And the last thing he needs is some kid in a bar calling him and Josh "fairy boys".

It's time for it to stop.

*

So he'll carry the Manhattan sidewalk inside of him, delete some of CJ's emails before he reads them, and catch his breath too quickly when he feels a hand on his back.

It will take him too long, and he will have days when it seems too hard, but he'll hide behind the things that make sense. The thump of the ball Toby throws against the wall. The geometric clarity of his speeches after a redline.

And there'll be no happily ever after.

There'll just be Josh, a history that's far from linear, and a kiss that once left Sam speechless, but was neither real nor imagined.

It's one part peach schnapps, one part cranberry and one part ginger ale. It's served over ice, and it's not so happy after all.


End file.
